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October 25, 2007

Facebook's been the belle of the ball since this spring, when it opened its virtual doors to one and all. Surpassing MySpace in growth, Facebook has been the subject of rumours for months, since Google and Microsoft have been vying for the social media mammoth's affections.

Ning, the latest startup of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, is looking to get a jump ahead of MySpace and Facebook by giving consumers free tools to create and operate specialized online social networks of their own...

Sites like MySpace offer Web users individual profile pages they can use to connect to friends, but typically keep control of the underlying network, including advertising sales.

By contrast, users within each Ning network can select the latest Web features for watching videos online, creating a photo slideshow, listening to music or publishing a blog. Members have far greater flexibility over the look of their personal profile pages, buddy lists and site color schemes.

"Other social network sites ask you to join their world. We are about people creating their own worlds," said Ning Chief Executive Gina Bianchini, who co-founded Ning with Andreessen.

January 29, 2007

MarketingVox reports on rumours that Google is working on its own version of SecondLife. From the sound of things, they've been lining up teams in the worlds of "metaverses," 3-D model creation, and online gaming to rollout a virtual world with "speculation being that Google will use real-world data gathered from their existing enterprises to craft an alternate reality platform online."

"In terms of paying users revenue against the content that they are uploading, we definitely are going to be moving in that direction," Hurley said in video recorded in Davos, by a YouTube user and posted on the site.

"We feel we are at a scale now that we will be able to do that and still have a true community around video."

I was concered about the precedent this would set in user-generated media...but goes to show how much of a novice I am on the user side. According to GearLive, YouTube's already lost contributers to Revver and MetaCafe, which are already paying for content.

Anyway, if anyone's going to figure out a reasonable way to pay content providers...well, I think Google might have some exeperience there.

January 22, 2007

I've been exploring it myself a bit, interested in seeing what the marketing possiblities might be. (Branded T-shirts for avatars? A billboard on Duran Duran's island?)

But reading this article made me realize how big you can go. IBM, for example, has virtual meetings in Second Life: They own several islands on the site, and over 3000 IBM staffers have avatars.

ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, has a branch in the virtual world.

Virtual real estate moguls have bought islands -- and have sub-divided the land and rented it out, parcel by parcel. Does anyone else smell a Trump opportunity here?

The most amazing learnings from the article? SecondLife, though it was exceedingly slow to take off, was deliberately left content-free. Even though it went for eons (in online time) with only about a thousand "citizens," creators and early investors were so encouraged and amazed by the creativty of those initial devotees, that they shied away from the obvious path of making it a gaming site. Instead, they invested in tools to foster that creativity and make the site a pioneer in CGM:

Impressed by this passion, Kapor wrote another seven-figure check, and Second Life relaunched in January 2004, this time with more focus on user creativity and in-world entrepreneurship. Linden (Labs) took the advice of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law School guru on intellectual property, who recommended letting users own their own content. That, he argued, would encourage them to create more.

And so came the Second Life we all know and love. Although, according to the article, it's in desperate need of better back-end technology (nearly 20% of first-time users will not return after their first visit out of sheer frustration) the site's here to stay and challenge the barriers of the Web.